Ayodhya Mosque Attack

Ayodhya is a town in northern India that has been the location of a contested sacred site revered by both Muslims and Hindus. The conflict—and the dramatic destruction of the site's mosque—has had national and even global political implications. The 1992 confrontation at the site is regarded as a benchmark in the global rise of religious activism against the secular state.

The town of Ayodhya is the capital of the old princely state of Awadh, and archaeological evidence indicates that it was also the location of an ancient Hindu temple. According to many Hindus, the ancient temple site is significant indeed; they claim that it is in fact the location of the birthplace of the god Ram. It was on this site that the Moghul emperor Babar constructed a mosque in 1528, perhaps demolishing the earlier temple to do so.

In the 1980s, with the rise of a new Hindu nationalism led by the right-wing political movement the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Ayodhya became the center of a political battle. The Babri Mosque became the symbol of the Indian government's secular stance—a position that protected all religious sites equally, including Muslim sites located on contested lands. The VHP wanted to make the point that the secularism of the government was in fact a pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu attitude. The rising anger of the Hindu activists was aimed as much at the secular state as at the Muslim community in India, which revered the mosque.

In 1992, the VHP sponsored a rally in Ayodhya to protest the Indian government's continued protection of the Babri Mosque. Though the town had less than 50,000 inhabitants, a crowd three times that size appeared at the location, demanding access to the site. The small police force guarding the mosque was quickly overwhelmed, and the crowd swarmed over the building, using sticks and broken fences to beat down the ancient edifice into pieces.

The destruction of the mosque led to tensions between Hindu and Muslim groups throughout the country. Although leaders of the new religious party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), distanced themselves from the actions of the mob, the rising sense of Hindu political power that the Ayodhya event symbolized helped bolster the strength of the party. A series of electoral successes ensued, and from 1998 to 2004, the BJP led India as the ruling party of a coalition government.

The site of the demolished mosque remained vacant after the 1992 destruction, protected by government security forces. In 2010, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court proclaimed its long-awaited verdict on which religious groups should have rights to the disputed land. In a Solomon-like decision, the court awarded stewardship of the site to both Hindu and Muslim organizations, but the decision was subsequently stayed by the Supreme Court on appeal and uncertainty about its fate continued for some time after.